google image search: search similar images

Question

I want to write a mobile app which takes a picture and searches google images for similar pictures and then displays the results.

However, with google image search I can only search for text strings, and with the search API it seems there's no possibility to search for similar pictures; this feature seems to be available only through the web interface.

Any idea how I can solve this problem?

thanks, Christoph

Answer 1

SerpAPI enables to search through Google Images and returns a clean JSON.

URL example: https://serpapi.com/search.json?q=Apple&tbm=isch&ijn=0

Documentation: https://serpapi.com/images-results

This service is integrated with most of the programming languages: python, php, java, golang, nodejs...

Google limit the number of search per day. but this service provides unlimited searches...

Answer 2

The Google Vision API.

https://cloud.google.com/vision/

This is very simple and easy and powerful.

Answer 3

I had done something like that recently for a mobile app, this is the code for it, it uses google search by image feature, and returns the "best guess" or the whole page

you could use that and modify it to do what you want, but once you get the best guess of the image you could search for any image with that title, etc

https://github.com/hbattat/search-by-image

Answer 4

I was looking for an answer to this some time ago, and found tineye. You have to pay for it, though. Currently (Jan 2012) USD300 for 5K searches, USD1.5K for 30K searches...

Answer 5

There is a way you can do this now, but its not officially supported, and there are probably some restrictions on the number of queries you can perform. Update

http://images.google.com/searchbyimage?hl=en&biw=1060&bih=766&gbv=2&site=search&image_url={{URL To your image}}&sa=X&ei=H6RaTtb5JcTeiALlmPi2CQ&ved=0CDsQ9Q8

There is also a google image search API, which is being officially deprecated, but it will work for now.

http://code.google.com/apis/imagesearch/

Answer 6

I don't think it's possible. If you click the link to find similar images from the images result page you get a link with the original query included:

google.com/images?q=ORIGINAL_QUERY&imgtype=i_similar&sa=...

If you remove that GET param manually, the search does not work, it only shows the images search form.

I dont think it is possible to find similar images with google if you do not know what's on it.